Archive for the 'Berkman' Category

Craig Newmark was visiting the Berkman Center today and he explained how founding Craiglist brought him to his current role as community organizer. But these are really the same, he says.

In 1994, Craig was working at Charles Schwab where he evangelized the net – figuring that this is the future of business for these types of firms. He showed people usenet newsgroups and The Well and he noticed people helping each other in very generous ways. He wanted to give back so he started a cc list for events in early 1995. He credits part of his success to the timing of this launch – early dot com boom. People were alwyas influential and for example suggested new categories etc. He was using pine for this and in mid 1995 he had 240 email addresses and pine started to break. He was going to call it SFevents, but people around him suggested CraigsList because it was a brand, and the list was more than events.

So he wrote some code to turn these emails into html and became a web publisher. At the end of 1997 3 events happened: CraigsList had one million page views per month (a billion in August 2004, now heading toward 13 billion per month), Microsoft Sidewalk approached him to run banner ads and he said no because he didn’t need the money, and then he was approached with the idea of having some of the site run on a volunteer basis. He went for volunteer help but in 1998 it didn’t work well since he wasn’t providing strong leadership for them. At the end of 1998 people approached him to fix this and so in 1999 he incorporated and hired Jim Buckmaster who continued the traditions of incorporating volunteer suggestions for the site, and maintained the simple design. Also in 1999 he decided to charge for job ads and to charge real estate agents (only apt brokers in NYC, which they requested to eliminate the perceived need to post and repost).

He has generalized his approach to “nerd values:” take care of yourself enough to live comfortably then after that you can start to focus on changing things.

After 2000 there was slow continuous progress, like the addition of more cities. He also says they made a mistake of anonymizing all email as a default. The idea was to protect against spammers, but people requested the choice, because there is personal branding in email. He notes conflicting feedback can be tough to deal with. For example people feel strongly about “backyard breeders” of pets and there was bickering that crossed into criminal harassment. He says this kind of thing is hard to deal with emotionally.

So why was CraigsList so successful? He claims it is their business model… and a culture of trust. Bad guys are a tiny percentage of the pop and people look out for each other. For example, the flagging mechanism (a post is removed automatically if many people flag it). How did they build this culture of trust? Craig says it was by acting on shared values from the beginning, ie golden rule, especially in customer service, and live and let live and to be forgiving and give breaks. They are still trying to listen to people although novel suggestions are rare – the biggest decisions are which new cities to include.

He still runs pine as the primary email tool. He says it keeps down RSI because it minimizes point and click.

Newmark sees himself as a community grassroots organizer: organizing people in mundane ways. So he has capitalized on this to help in other ways beyond CraigsList. He doesn’t see anything about CraigsList as philanthropic, but he wants to extend this approach to help in the future of the media. For example face to face communication doesn’t scale on the Internet, but democracy is best facilitated through in person communication. So Craig sees the Internet as a great facilitator of face to face communication. He believes 2009 is the new 1787! This is about accountability and transparency – exposing everything the government is doing to sanitize it.

Another quip of advice from Craig: socialize more than he did as an undergrad – he says he got a better education than he needed and would have been better off spending more time socializing.

His talk was titled “After Selfishness: Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0 at Half Time” and he sets out to show that there is a sea change happening in the study of organizational systems that far better reflects how we actually interact, organize, and operate. He explains that the collaborative movements we generally characterize as belonging to the new internet age (free and open source software, wikipedia) are really just the instantiation of a wider and pervasive, in fact completely natural and longstanding, phenomena in human life.

This is due to how we can organize capital in the information and networked society: We own the core physical means of production as well as knowledge, insight, and creativity. Now we’re seeing longstanding society practices, such as non-hierarchical norm generation and collaboration more from the periphery of society to the center of our productive enterprises. Benkler’s key point in this talk is that this shift is not limited to Internet-based environments, but part of a broader change happening across society.

So how to we get people to produce good stuff? money? prizes? competition? Benkler notes the example of YouTube.com – contributors are not paid yet the community thrives. Benkler hypothesizes that the key is that people feel secure in their involvement with the community: not paying but creating a context where people feel secure in their collaboration in a system. Another example is Kaltura.com: Benkler attributes their success to ways they have found to assure contributors that when you produce you will be able to control what you produce. Cash doesn’t change hands. The challenge is to learn about human collaboration in general from these web-based examples. In Benkler’s words “replacing Leviathan with a collaborative system.”

Examples outside the web-based world include GM’s experience with it’s Fremont plant. This plant was among the worst performance in the company. GM shut it down for two years and brought it back 85% staffed by the previous workforce, the same union, but reorganized collaboratively to align incentives. This means there are no longer process engineers on the shop floor and direct control over experimentation and flow at the team level is gone. The plant did so well it forced the big three to copy although they did so in less purely collaborative ways, such as retaining competitive bidding. Benkler’s point is that there is a need for long term relationships based on trust. An emphasis on norms and trust, along with greater teamwork and autonomy for workers implies a more complex system with less perfect control than Hobbes’ Leviathan vision. The world changes too quickly for the old encumbered hierarchical model of economic production.

Benkler thinks this leads us to study social dynamics, an open field without many answers yet. He also relates this work to evolutionary biology: from group selection theory of the 50’s to the individualistic conception in Dawkins’ theory of the selfish gene in the 70’s, and now to multi-level selection and cooperation as a distinct driving force in evolution as opposed to the other way around. This opens a vein of research in empirical deviations from selfishness, as a pillar of homo economicus, just as Kahneman and Tversky challenged the twin pillar of rationality.

Benkler’s vision is to move away from the simple rigid hierarchical models toward ones that are richer and more complex and can capture more of our actual behavior, while still being tractable enough to produce predictions and a larger understanding of our world.

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center, is moderating a panel on the future of news at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum. The panelists were given two minutes and gave us some soundbites.

Paul Steiger is Editor-in-Chief of ProPublica, a non profit with 25 journalists created to fill the gap left by the shrinking newsrooms in the country. He was a Wall Street Journal managing editor for 16 years previously. When he was at the WSJ, he remembers 15% of the budget being allocated to news and the rest to operations, and now at ProPublica more than 60% of the budget is on news. This is due to the web and how easy operations are now. When asked about his vision in 2013, he doesn’t anticipate making money since their mandate is not to sell advertising and remain a nonprofit.

Jonathan Taplin is a Professor at USC Annenberg and a former producer of films with Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese. He worries 2013 might bring commercial overload and not just an information overload. He agrees with David Weinberger that the struggle will be over meta-data. He sees an advance of the commodizing of freedom – social networks mine information about you even though they seem free. So he sees an eventual FaceBook/MySpace type polarization widely on the web where some users are in an ad free world they pay for and others in a free world full of ads. These become two separate world that don’t interact.

Jennifer Ferro is Assistant General Manager and Executive Producer of Good Food at KCRW. She sees a convergence of devices and platforms where devices become less relevant. She doesn’t think people are going to carry radios and the internet will become pervasive with a backbone of media sites people primarily visit.

Jonathan Krim is Director of Strategic Initiatives of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. He thinks the traditional story telling model, based on objectivity, will be abandoned and journalists will seek to attribute all points of view to others. He sees the blogosphere, television, and some print pioneers creating spaces where reporters are free to write what they know – where the quality of the reporters is important and considering the other side is important. This means that we will approach something closer to a press that reports along certain lines that will identify them. Krim believes this scenario enhances the credibility of the journalists and allows for wider sourcing and more public participation.

Lisa Williams, of Placeblogger.com, sees shorter job tenure with a greater number of popular journalists rather than a cabal of a few. This gives a wider breadth to the stories and more depth: for example 6000 amputee soldiers have returned from Iraq – but how many have been fitted with prosthetics? Important questions like this would be tough to answer in a traditional newsroom but in 2013 the media will be capable of answering this.

David Cohn, from digidave.org and Newstrust.net, has 2 mantras: 1) the future is open and distributed and 2) journalism is a process not a product. Cohn sees these converging to the question how does the process become more open and distributed? He wants newspapers to be more like a public library in that they are a source of information about your community. He follows ideas in Richard Sambrook’s talk last night in that he wants to content to be open and distributed through networked journalism.

Jon Funabiki is a Professor of Journalism at San Francisco University. He thinks dialog in 2013 will center around our passions. He sees 3 trends: 1) increasing democratic diversity in the US and increasing globalization 2) an explosion of ethnic new media from identity based communities 3) the increasing practice of community based organizations using new media tools like journalistic narrative story telling designed to move services to communities. So he wants to couple old media with new community produced media since it all contributes to the ongoing civic dialog.

Solana Larsen is managing editor of Global Voices and previously a commissioning editor of Open Democracy. She is worried about journalistic integrity – journalists interviewing journalists who are on the scene and reporting secondhand information with an aura of knowledability. She wants journalists to talk to local people and be honest with their audiences about how much they really know about the topic. She thinks in 2013 there will be no foreign correspondents and news will be reported by people who understand the local context and culture.

Margaret Duffy is a Professor from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and she is speaking at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum. She leads a Citizen Media Participation project to create a taxonomy of news categories and get a sense of the state of citizen media via sampling news across the nation. They are interested in where the funding in coming from, the amount of citizen participation, and getting an idea of what the content is. They are also creating a social network called NewNewsMedia.org connecting seekers and posters to bring together people interested in the same sorts of things.

She’s sampled the country in local regions and found that, for example, Richmond Virginia is a hotbed for citizen journalism and blogging and says their methods of connecting to each other are unique. This suggests that blogging and citizen media seems to remain a local phenomenon. Across the country, they were suprised by how the sites were not all that particpatory, for example there isn’t much capability to upload on these sites. She suggests this is because gatekeeping seems very important and blogs tends to be tightly controlled by their authors. They also have seen a lot more linking to outside their sites and many blogs are trying to sell advertisihng (with highly varying levels of success).

The driving force behind the project is the idea that from a social capital standpoint they think that strong community connection make a difference to how to community survives in a democratic process. Her results on the local nature of citizen media suggests a more traditional notion of what a community is. Ethan Zuckerman discusses that community can define itself by local geography or aroudn subject matter and he suggests (referencing the talk below) that we are developing new metric for monetizing site based on reaching the right community and how we define the community is important for the sustainability of websites.

In a study she published at the www.ipdi.com the internet users political campaigners had traditionally not focused on are in fact the most active and most connected people in their local community. So now the campaigns and news media understand their audiences differently. If you read a newspaper or watch Sunday morning talk shows and PBS you are more likely to be a poli-fluential (about doubling your odds). Interestingly, purchashing political paraphenalia online increases your odds of being a poli-fluential about 5-fold, as with joining political groups and actively emailing representatives. But the kicker is that people who are self-declared independents who made a political contribution are 80 times more likely to be a poli-fluential than not.

Can we find sustainable funding models for citizen journalism? She suggests the poli-fluentials are the ones to target by advertisers since their opinions are those that filter out influentially to the community and where you get the most band for your advertising buck.

ini the panel discussions following the talk, Marc Cooper from the HuffingtonPost and a USC professor comments on how much it matters who is reading his site. He wants to maximize this number, rather than target the poli-fluentials. Impact is whether people are reading the stories, whether they filter into the broader media and whether they spawn debate. Clint Ivy from Fox Interactive Media suggests that you need to decide whether your goal is to make money or not and the appropriate metric flows from this. He uses the number of comments per post to measure influence, others might just decide whether or not they get a sense a satisfaction from blogging. Dan Gillmor, another Berkman fellow and Director of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU. reframes the problem as one of finding the right things to measure – how do you get a handle on the community mailing list that never bubbles out beyond the community. He thinks this things are enormously valuable and get overlooked. Ethan Zuckerman of GlobalVoices and another Berkman fellow is concerned about agenda setting and whether the right stories are coming up onto the front page and he is worried about the fact that the numbers tend to reflect not influence but whether the stories are important and underheard. Is is easy to get many hits on your blogs by picking a sensational story but having tens of hundreds of the right readers reading the right story is tough to measure. Marc Cooper questions whether any of these questions are new in the digital age or just a rehashing of the same question journalists have always faced.

John Kelly is a doctoral student a Columbia’s School of Communications, a startup founder (Morningside Analytics), as well as doing collaborative work with Berkman. He’s speaking Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum.

Kelly says he takes an ecosystem approach to studying the blogosphere since he objects to dividing research on society into cases and variables because it is an interconnection whole. This isn’t right and basic statistical methods that use variables and cases and designed specifically to take interconnections into account. What he is doing with the research he presents today is using a graphical tool to present descriptions of the blogosphere.

Kelly shows a map of the entire blogosphere and the outlinks from the blogosphere. Every dot is a blog and any blogs that are linked are pulled together – so the map itself looks like clusters and neighborhoods of blogs. The plot seems slightly clustered but there is an enormous amount of interlinking (my apologies for not posting pictures – I don’t think this talk is online). In the outlinks maps to links from blogs to other sites – the New York Times is most frequently linked to and thus the largest dot on the outlinks map.

Kelly compares maps for 5 different language blogospheres: English, Persian, Russian, Arabic, and Scandinavian languages. Russian has very separate clusters and other languages get progressively more interconnected. In the Persian example, Kelly has found distinct clusters of ex-pat cloggers, poetry, and religious conservative bloggers concerned about the 12th Inam, as well as clusters of modern and moderately traditional religious and political bloggers. Kelly suggests this is a more disparate and discourse oriented picture than we might have thought.

In the American blogosphere Kelly notes that bloggers tend to link overwhelmingly to other blogs that are philosophically aligned with their own blog. He shows an interesting plot of Obama, Clinton, McCain blogopsheres’ linking patterns to other sites such as thinktanks and particular YouTube videos.

Kelley also maps a URL’s salience: main stream media articles peak quickly and are sometimes over taken by responses, but Wikipedia article keep getting consistent hits over time.

The last plot he shows is a great one of the blogs of the people attending this conference (and their organizations): there are 5 big dots representing how much people have blogged about the people – main stream media sites are the 5 big dots. Filtering out of those gives GlobalVoices as the blogs people mainly link to.

David Weinberger is a fellow and colleague of mine at the Berkman Center and is at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum discussing the difference the web is making to journalism: “what’s different about the web when it comes to media and journalism?”

Weinberger is concerned with how we frame this question. He prefers ‘ecosystem’ rather than ‘virtue of discomfort’ since this gets at the complexity and interdependence in online journalism. But the ecosystem analogy is too apt and too comforting and all-encompassing so he pushes further. He doesn’t like the ‘pro-amateur’ analogy since it focuses too much on money as the key difference in web actors, and yet somehow seems to understate the vast disparity in money and funding. The idea of thinking of news as creating a better informed citizenry so that we get a better democracy doesn’t go far enough – Weinberger notes that people read the news for more reasons than this.

So he settles on ‘abundance’ as a frame due to the fact that control doesn’t scale which is something being address currently with online media. “Adundance of crap is scary but abundance of good stuff is terrifying!” The key question is how to deal with this. We are no longer in a battle over the front page since other ways of getting information are becoming more salient. For example, Weinberger notes that “every tag is a front page” and email recommendations often become our front page. He sees this translating into a battle over metadata – the front page is metadata, authority is metadata – and we are no longer struggling over content creation. So we create new tools to handle metadata – in order to show each other what matters and how it matters. Tools such as social networks and the sematic web. All these tools unsettle knowledge and meaning (knowledge and meaning that has not been obvious but was always there).

Robert Suro is a professor of journalism at USC and spoke today at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum. His talk concerns journalism’s role in democratic processes and he draws two distinctions in how we think about journalism that often get conflated: journalism is a business but also a social actor. he points out that when main stream media’s profitability decline we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming its impact of in the democratic arena declines as well.

He also has trouble with the term “participatory media” and draws a distinction between the study of who is participating and what means they use (his definition of participatory media) and “journalism of participation” which evaluates the media in terms of a social actor – the object is effective democratic governance. He is worried these two concepts get confused and people can mistakenly equate the act of participating in the media, for example adding comments to a web site, with effective participation in the democratic process.

The result of this distinctions is that if you want to assess participatory media in terms of social impact you have to study more than who they are and what they produce but also whether this activity is engendering civic engagement that makes democracy more representative and government more effective.

Suro notes that this isn’t new: he hypothesizes that journalism doesn’t change often but when it does it is a big change, and we’re in the middle of just such a change right now. As an example of a previous change he gives the debate between two editors who were interested in the creation of civil society. One was supported by Jefferson and Madison and the other by Hamilton and Adams. Both were partisan in what they said and who funded them and both were committed to democracy but understood the role of the state differently, resulting in the creation of the democratic and republican parties. Although both would be fired as editors today there is a long history of social democratic results in journalism and the fundamental role of journalism in a democratic society is subject to change. We should study the ongoing redefinition and try and understand causality and impact.

Suro also thinks the Lippmann/Dewey argument about whether the goal of journalism should be to produce highly informed elites or mobilize the masses and create informed debate is alive and well. He suggests we have always produces a mix of these outcomes and will inevitably continue to do so, but now we have the address the mix of journalistic processes. He thinks the right way to look at this is to asses what outcome to they produce in terms of quality of leadership. Suro also touches on Cass Sunstein’s polarization concern in that is will produce less effective governance: we need to understand how a mix of new and old media can create a megaphone that artificially amplifies a voice that might not be the most effective.

I’m at Berkman’s Media Re:public Forum and Richard Sambrook, director of Global News at the BBC is giving the first talk. He is something of a technological visionary and his primary concern is with how technology is affecting the ability of, not only traditional media but anyone, to set the international news agenda.

The model that news stories may break on the blogs and travel to main stream media seems incomplete to Sambrook and he hopes to use the news audience to develop the agenda in an interactive way through network journalism. An example he gives is how the BBC puts their NewsNight show’s agenda online in the morning and invites people to comment on the choice of stories and angles they are taking on them. But this seems quite small, and as Ethan Zuckerman points out in a question, not much of a change in paradigm: Zuckerman laments that main stream media is trying to involve the public on their terms and in their way, through site-hosted comments and being quite closed about sharing their content. Sambrook explains this as slowness of cultural change at organizations like the BBC and is changing. For example, BBC video can now be hosted on any site. Sambrook is also worried that they just can’t seem to find the audience – the right people to engage with in various areas. He notes that the top ten sites (Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia Fox News etc) control 1 billion eyeballs. He doesn’t think current business models are sustainable and perhaps energy should be directed into a different metric than eyeballs to more accurately measure engagement and be able to monetize it.

Sambrook notes that across main stream media it is well understood that the future of news is online but there are cultural legacies within main stream media and even where there aren’t solutions to new problems aren’t obvious. Sambrook gives the example of the BBC’s river boat trip through Bangladesh. They experimented with several ways of reaching potentially interested audiences: twitter, google maps to track the boat, images on Flickr, radio and traditional news. They had 26 followers on twitter and 50k on Flicker but millions on the radio. This highlights the difficulty news outlets are having reaching their audience – the methods chosen are key, and how to do this is not obvious.

Sambrook says that he sees an upcoming tipping point for the data-driven web, or semantic web, in news applications. For Sambrook, this manifests as an improvement in the personalization of news. He mentions the BBC’s dashboard tool – a way to pull content from all over the BBC’s website to suit your interests and tastes. He is also concerned about the tension with agenda setting: “who is the curator of the kind of news you are interested in?” This also brings to mind Cass Sunstein’s polarization critique of the internet, especially for news delivered online – that we will only seek out news that fundamentally agrees with our own opinions and create echo chambers in which we never hear opposing thinking and thus open discourse and debate becomes stultified. He seems to see the future as communication within communities and he frames the problem as finding the right community and getting them involved in an effective way.

Berkman’s Media Re:public project is bringing people together to discuss the state of participatory media within the current information environment, called Media Re:public Forum. I’m going to be there!

On February 7th and 8th, the Berkman Center hosted a three day conference entitled “Digitally-Empowered Activists: Getting the Tools to the People Who Need Them” in Istanbul, Turkey. The presentations highlighted efforts by people to use tools, such as video, SMS, and blogging, and focused on ways of communicating these methodologies to activists who can benefit from them.

Aside from video mashup, Gharbia has also created a Tunisian Prison Map, depicting the locations of prisons using Google Earth and including popup widowns for each prison showing video from an interview with a current prisoner, Human Rights Watch, or Medecins Sans Frontiers, or similar commentary.

Social Mobile: FrontlineSMS

The second speaker was Ken Banks, creator of FrontlineSMS, a tool geared toward nonprofit groups seeking SMS communication. It was designed to reintegrate a group of South Africans, displaced to make way for Kruger National Park, into the dialog about conservancy. The tool is useful because other media are often unable to reach the populations targeted, and the creation of a portable messaging hub to send and receive messages to mobile phones makes it difficult for the service to be blocked by governments. The service has been used for elections monitoring in Nigeria and the Philippines among others, communication between the media and rural areas in Zimbabwe, circumventing the state of emergency in Pakistan late last year, communicating coffee prices to farmers as part of the post-tsunami rebuilding effort in Aceh, and others.

Facebook as a Tool for Activists?

Imran Jamal then spoke as a representative of the Burma Global Action Network and its use of Facebook as a tool for advocacy. The Facebook Group “Support the Monks’ Protest in Burma” is one of the largest groups with 403,393 members as of February 12, 2008. It was started by Jamal and others to document information about the Saffron Revolution and coordinate various global events. Jamal noted that Facebook was good at reaching lots of users and serving to align and inform the various advocacy groups, but he notes that the Facebook format is not customizable by the groups themselves and does not naturally lend itself to advocacy. For example, comments are difficult to search and retrieve information from, and it is difficult to grow and maintain an activist base, particularly since Facebook groups larger than 10,000 are not permitted to send messages to all their members.

The Role of Blogs in the Kenyan Elections

The next presentation highlighted the role of blogs and twitter in last December’s Kenyan presidential elections, especially with respect to monitoring the violence and strife in the aftermath. Several blogs, such as KenyanPundit.com and Ushahidi.com, are nearly exclusively covering the elections protests. Many of the blogging sites are organized into the Kenyan blog webring kenyaunlimited.com. One blog site, Mashada.com, became ethnically divisive enough to be unmoderatable and the forums were closed. In its place, the organizers set up ihavenotribe.com, where Kenyans and others are successfully submitting their thoughts.

Another site that was discussed was MamaMikes.com, which allows people to log on and deposit money to have it delivered to people in Kenya in the form of various different commodities, such as gasoline, beer, mobile phone credit (note that through the m-pesa system money can be transferred from one mobile phone to another).

Favorite Digital Activism Tools

The group also discussed their favorite digital activism tools, such as gmail and other google apps, audio (especially for rural communities), collaborative tools such as wikis and google docs, photoblogging, digg and other story dissemination sites. Other concerns raised were security and anonymity measures, tools for fundraising, tools for translation, and attention paid to low bandwidth web use.

Jesse Dylan, the director behind Will.I.Am‘s Yes We Can song video and Rob Holzer, CEO of Syrup NYC, want to bring their vision for political change through the Hope|Act|Change web site (http://hopeactchange.com). Karim Lakhani, Harvard Business School professor, is moderating the discussion.

They are looking for advice on how the Hope|Act|Change movement can go beyond Barack’s speech and the resulting video, and into an effective web presence. He calls it a nonofficial “call to action” to get people connecting to each other and out to vote. He also notes how the song has become a “folk song” and a meme beyond the campaign itself. They want this to move beyond a campaign message and into action, by which he means primarily voting, but perhaps also a kiva-like contribution system or calendar based to-do actions for people to focus on particular issues at a time, or possibly, as Karim suggests, swarming in creating meetings. They have an interesting problem: boiling the message down to what a real person would connect to.

They started with the idea of a mosaic for the website – each tile is an image that has been uploaded by users or tagged with “hopeactchange” on Flickr. They remade the video from frames they have “mosaicked” so you can mouse over the video and see the user images pop up. Each uploading user has a page on the site detailing what they have uploaded and what their favorite images are.

Rob wants to improve the site by creating more peer-to-peer interactive tools so that people can pledge action or discuss issues and bring more people in. The hope is to move this beyond the election to a promulgator of discussion, even beyond Obama, but right now they are pretty focused on the upcoming general election. Rob notes that the site is a platform for some bigger ideas to develop responses and perhaps policy. Will Ferrell and Adam MacKay are involved in improving how funny the site is, and Jesse says animators are getting involved. He wants to see both more context and more discussion.

They are both very much in favor of a suggestion of a simple webform with your hope and your pledge and then use a Digg-like forum to rise the big ones to the top. Colin Maclay analogizes this to Tom Steinberg’s Pledgebank.com and a questioner notes you could use a visualization of pledges to show how big the movement is. Jesse and Rob are also interested in freely releasing as much media as possible so people can create mashups and build on their work artistically. They also want to release the API so that people can also build on the code.
They also note that a high quality site will encourage people to submit higher quality video and images, but also it helps candidates because voters will compare the different sites that supporters have created for their favorite candidates.

An HBS student, Dave, questions the wisdom of being so explicit about the voting goal, that it might make it uncool or too preachy. He also questions the durability of the hopeactchange mantra for the post election. Jesse thinks the site won’t talk about voting until the election is close and then it will emphasize a big push to vote. Dave suggests moving it beyond voting to just how these political messages can have emotional impact, since that is the original impetus of the site and a push to vote could undermine the emotional impact of the video, and the site itself. An audience member suggests changing the mantra from Yes We Can to Yes We Will. Another person suggests that if the message rises organically from the community it will be most effective.

This is new ground for this election and new ways of gathering and spreading electoral information – what is interesting is not just that candidates are aware of this but supporters are making this a battleground for voters as well. Gene Koo notes this seems to be consonant with Barack’s message of bottom up change and policy setting by community action.